DEVELOPMENT OF COORDINATIONS IN CHILD LANGUAGE

All human languages contain both sentential coordinations and nonsentential or reduced coordinations. Although coordination in adult language has been widely investigated, research in the acquisition of coordinations by children has been severely lacking. Comprehension and production tests of and-coordinations in English were conducted on 60 children ranging in age from 2.5 to 6.0 years. Guttman scale analysis of the comprehension test indicated that sentential and reduced coordinations are acquired in a particular order that reflects their relative difficulty. The results of the production test provided additional support for this order of acquisition. To explain these findings, it is argued that the child initially relies on a Linear Sequencing Requirement to process coordinations, then slowly replaces this requirement with a more complex Coordination Strategy. © 1979 Academic Press, Inc.